“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want her girlhood—she wants to repeat the honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

I’m pretty sure, now that I think about it, that it was the first time I had ever seen Michael Vick play, in that comeback in Morgantown. Up until 1999, Virginia Tech had been, at least to me, a banal Top 25 team, in that class with Clemson and Auburn and Georgia Tech — teams that were always ranked, that always played some good games, always played January bowl games, but never mattered in the title race. Vick, of course, changed that at Virginia Tech, and by the time I laid eyes on him, the Hokies were already No. 3 in the polls.

It was that run down the sidelines during the final drive that arrested my attention. It was so sudden and so graceful — so easy for Vick to transform the dynamic of that final minute from “Virginia Tech still needs a bunch of yards in a short amount of time” to “Oh, they’re in field-goal range now. They’re going to win.”

It was Will Hunting easy for Michael Vick to turn upfield on that play, and what seems so innocuous to us now wasn’t then. Quarterbacks didn’t do that. They weren’t that fast and elusive and graceful.*

*And if they were, they were doing it at a lower level of college football. This is my Steve McNair acknowledgment.

Last night, as Virginia Tech was turning Boise State’s 17-0 lead into a game that would come down to the final minute, ESPN put up a graphic of the current AP top ten. “If the Hokies come back,” Brent Musberger said, “then TCU becomes the new darling of the anti-BCS crowd.”

This is the conventional wisdom—that college football fans who hate the BCS and want to see a playoff (in other words, pretty much every college football fan) should root for underdogs like Boise State and TCU in order to undermine the BCS’ legitimacy.

But this is wrong. People who want to see the end of the BCS should have been rooting against the Broncos last night. After their win, there is a more-than-decent chance that the Broncos will go undefeated—of their remaining opponents, only Oregon State is ranked in the Top 25, and they are already in danger of falling out. And if Boise State goes undefeated, then there is a more-than-decent chance that the team makes the National Championship. Continue reading →